Spanish food and culture, adios!

The tour of Spain, highlighting the green, mountainous north, ends today. I am flying back to the States on Delta at noon.

Travel is exhilarating. I love sampling the breads, cured meats, cheeses, and pastries of various parts of the world. Food encapsulates the culture of a country and its people, and reflects the regional experience which fascinates me no end.

Some people on the tour spoke of how they didn't like Spanish food. For me Spanish food is the dark side, the opposite side of food I knew as a child in the Philippines. I love the spices the Spanish use because they are the same as those used on the islands they once ruled.

We're in Madrid, cosmopolitan and stylish in the area around the Cybele fountain, touristy and historical around Plaza de Oro but I can understand why the early Filipino illustrados largely lived in Barcelona where art is softer and divergence from the mainstream is cultivated.

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Trip to Northern Spain Coming to an End

This is the second hotel we've been in with free WiFi but I have not posted to the Internet except for some photos to my Flickr photo stream. This one was shot at a public park near the Old Town area of Santiago de Compostela. A co-traveler, Wil, and I took a walk the afternoon after we arrived in the pilgrimage city. I enjoy visiting tourist spots, the remarkable features of the cities we visited, but I am most interested just in seeing how people there live.

In Spain, by five or six in the afternoon, public squares, parks and pedestrian malls are full of families enjoying themselves. What a refreshing change from the States. Children run and play while their parents, often both father and mother, watched them and chatted with each other. The public spaces become Spain's giant living room.

We're flying to Madrid at noon, then back to the U.S. tomorrow.

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The Way Shrouded in Clouds and Mist

On the eve of my scheduled travels the next two months, these photos of my previous trips bring up even more feeling. I look at landscape images from other photographers and marvel at the quality of their images. In particular I like the vividness of the images, not so much the composition i.e. the crop they choose to make of the 360° world they are standing in. On the other hand I believe I've improved my own skills at both photography and processing the images after the shoot but the way to where I want them to be is very long, shrouded as always in clouds and mist!

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More than creativity to being an artist

In his 1995 book, Becoming a Chef, coauthored with his wife, Karen Page, sous chef Andrew Dornenburg wrote: "This profession requires a tremendous amount of hard work. There is more to being a chef than creativity, just as there is more than creativity to being an artist. As in any other craft, chefs must practice, practice, practice. Perfection is the only acceptable benchmark."
 
Reading this was reassuring. We have our innate, gut sense of what looks, sounds, tastes, smells or feels good but as human beings that mostly do things with their hands, art is also craft, the manipulation of objects to align with what we see in our minds and hearts.

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A serious photographer is a businessman first, an artist a distant second

Scott Bourne, interviewed by Jason Anderson on the latest Learning Digital Photography podcast, had some attention-grabbing comments. He quoted someone else saying some 99% of camera lenses are better than 98% of the photographers who use them. Humbling! He told Jason that when he did portrait and fashion photography he shot with long lenses, 400 and 500 mm babies! He said photographs in fashion magazines like Vogue are taken with long lenses for richer detail. Use side lights for maximum texture in landscapes but direct frontal light (light behind your shoulder) for shooting nature and birds. He started his photography career in the 1970s when his father who worked for an Indianapolis/Bloomington paper got him a pass to shoot pictures at the Indy 500. After doing motor racing photography, he did the usual wedding and portrait, fashion and product photography before he was lured into nature and finally avian photography. Shooting with a Canon for 17 years, he switched to Nikon D7s that focus more quickly and have less noise at high ISOs.
 
His one comment that floored: he is a businessman, not an artist. He spends 80% of his time selling his photographs (and now videos), only 20% on actually doing photography. I'm not there at all.
 
The podcast host, Jason, writes in his photography website that he has been shooting pictures for three years. His portraits are ordinary but his landscapes are very good. Like me he wants to shift from doing IT to making his photography his bread-and-butter. He is married, apparently with children.
 
I shot the photo above on my walk up the Monon Trail to 116th Street this evening. The sun came out after a rainy morning and a cloudy afternoon and the light was great. I had not walked on the Monon since I walked there with the Banthias in early August. I fall into other routines and forget how pleasant it is walking on the trail in the late afternoon when the air is cooler and the light perfect for taking pictures.

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Napa Cabbage Soup with Pepita Rice

Ah, the joy of creating a meal from refrigerator leftovers! I rather like the balls of white sushi rice studded with raw Pepita. I know I need to eat pumpkin seeds for the estrogenic effects on the prostate so any way to encourage consumption through taste sensations is welcome.

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QuickTime X versus QuickTime 7 for video compression

To finish the new website I am working on the video page before tackling the text (currently called blog) page but I didn't anticipate diving headlong into video compression. Compression, like motion and color, are the most intimidating phases of preparing a video for delivery. The videos I have completed are all large files. I worked under no file size constraints. They are too large for the iWeb software I am using. I can post them but streaming would be stringently slow.
 
So, I'm stuck here whereas I had envisioned flying through these last two sections of the website.
 
The image above shows the video display on QuickTime Player 7 and the new QuickTime X that is included in the recent Snow Leopard Mac OS upgrade. I exported the Final Cut Pro movie file as a 1280x720 video on QuickTime with an appreciably sharper and more vivid picture but the size fourfold!
 
More than ever I feel mastery of compression is the final Holy Grail of video production. This should not be! Shooting and editing should be at the heart of the beast!

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